maybe I'll see you where the world ends
Aug. 23rd, 2006 12:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmA few weeks before we parted ways, I helped Michael clean his house. Mostly this meant he picked up stacks of paper and handed them to me, and then I riffled through them, bored and curious. In one, I found the only letter I had ever written him from far away, unopened.
I was twenty-two the last time I went to New Orleans. It was my very first business trip, and I was alone. New York hadn’t even been fifty degrees when I left, despite it being May, and so when I arrived into that swelter in a floor length black wool coat, I nearly fainted. Now it seems like an echo. I remember the ugly, smoggy ride from the airport into town, palm trees, a horse tied up to a building, a man in a seersucker suit dancing, and when I went to my meeting in a black business suit, the lady from the Mississippi bureau telling me I must be from New York because of it. I worked for the Associated Press then.
The night Katrina came, Kali was over, and it was hard for me to tear myself away from the news. I like news – it was what I used to do, after all, and despite only working in it a few years, I still carry the bogus sense that watching whatever is happening on TV is some sort of action. Maybe paying attention always is; but then, maybe it’s just these days. Kali’s boyfriend is from New Orleans, wasn’t down there then, but I worried about his heart, and hers. After a while, we agreed to turn off the news. When we checked it later, the storm had come through and everything seemed fine. The world had not ended, because the waters rose later.
I will watch you over and over. That’s what I wrote September 11, 2002, when I kept watching the news and friends wouldn’t or couldn’t. Being in the moment of the event seemed preferable to its aftermath. That’s a pathology of reporters and why I left the business. Perhaps I should blame my synethstesia, that speaking and seeing aren’t much different for me. Certain types of pain taste like blueberries.
At work, I would announce water level updates, neighborhood by neighborhood as they came in. It was a distant curiosity to them that I was so involved in something I wasn’t involved in at all. When 9/11 happened, it was calling my boss to tell him they needed C batteries, not A batteries here or there. I sat in our office, while he drove an SUV of stuff he’d gotten as Costco around to various central points. Where do we buy dog booties? he called to ask at one point. It felt like doing something, but was merely the same mad scramble. I would write People are giving out their home phone numbers on the television. We were learning the signs and language of the end of the world.
When I was small, my parents would make me turn off the TV at dinner. These days, I recognize that this was important – this development of social discourse at mealtimes. As a child though, it made me angry, my father’s low disgust at what was on the news. He said he couldn’t stand to watch all those terrible things. I could stand it. And I was seven. Why couldn’t he?
I gave a two-hour presentation in New Orleans on the day after my arrival, and then had two days to do as I chose. Young, and from New York, none of the bureau people invited me to anything, and I was glad, because I was certain that in New Orleans something was waiting for me.
Walking in the French Quarter alone, hypnotized by gaslights and believing in the stories my parents reviled me for as a child, I wondered if maybe vampires were real, and were waiting for me to follow the right trumpet down the right deserted street. I didn’t much care if whatever was calling to me was going to get me killed, something was calling to me, and I knew enough to know that didn’t happen to most people.
Then again, most people aren’t storytellers, aren’t listeners, and if they believe in ghosts at all believe that something has to be alive before it can be spectral. Before I left, my boss, Bill, had said It’s America’s alcohol theme park! There was a convention of twenty-thousand Shriners there when I arrived, and teen-agers carrying giant crosses through the streets. Men stared at me from balconies and doorways and it wasn’t so much that I didn’t have the courage to be a whore, as I thought I would be disappointed by the experience.
Kali read a lyric essay at one of her conferences this year, a story of flesh and cities. It includes New Orleans. There’s a copy on my desk, found in a recent cleaning fit.
For Phoenix Rising I will return to New Orleans. And I worry I won’t hear things calling to me, won’t walk alone to listen for it, will see merely an echo of what I lived with those years in Washington DC – a city without people, merely tourists and concepts. The Washington DC you see is not the Washington DC of its true citizens – largely poor and black. When someone tells you they are from DC, generally, they mean Maryland or Virginia. As a tourist, you’re supposed to love DC blind. New Orleans too, I think. This is wrong, because I know I never knew DC until I sat on the stoop of a voodoo shop at 1 in the morning, listening to blues trailing out of a private club on the other side of the street in a deserted industrial neighborhood, long since paved over with condos.
The letter Michael never opened was written in my hotel room after that night of walking alone. I was at the Double Tree, the air conditioning was out, and The Lost Boys was on TV, and I wrote to man I barely knew and believed myself to be in love with because he was as verbally frenetic as myself (later, the feeling was truer and more complex, I state for the record) about how I was supposed to be spending this time fucking a stranger, but wouldn’t you know it, and I laughed in my handwriting, I was too scared.
Three days after Katrina hit, I did something I have never done. I turned off the news. My desk job is in media analysis, and I was doing probably every waking minute of my day except my commute listening to or reading the news from the Gulf Coast. After the article about people euthanizing their dogs at a hospital because they didn’t think they would survive to care for them, I started shaking. Above all things, I believe in doing what is necessary. Largely, I think I adhere to that world view successfully, and build my own very real and occasionally vicious code of honour around and upon it. However, what is necessary is always larger than advertised; may we all never have cause to learn this in the flesh. But it was what I learned of on TV and in the papers during Katrina, and maybe after, I became quieter about certain things. And despite repeated attempts, I have been unable to watch more than a few minutes of the Spike Lee documentary about it all on HBO. I start crying and change the channel.
In New Orleans in May, I will dress like a man who doesn’t exist and be irritated by my inability to raise one eyebrow instead of both. I will write Kali a letter. And I will find an excuse to throw on mundane clothes and walk the French Quarter at night alone, in case I can still hear earlier fictitious loves of mine calling from down dark and dirty streets. I will attempt to explore and remember in a place with a type of magick that unsettles me, a dozen foods I once loved that can only poison me now, and a type of heat that requires an acceptance of filth.
For the record, I believe that time is bullshit, that everything has already happened, and that everything happens at once. We perceive time as linear and experience grief due to this perception, but it is in actuality merely a seething ball of disorder. Any story, every story, is not only true, but begins wherever one wishes to notice, pull or pick up the thread.
Every writer has one place where they believe the world ends. For Steve Erickson it is Berlin. And I know for me, for all the romances I haven’t had and will never have with it, it is New Orleans. And I think maybe sometimes, that she was made for grief for things before they’re ever even lost.
I was twenty-two the last time I went to New Orleans. It was my very first business trip, and I was alone. New York hadn’t even been fifty degrees when I left, despite it being May, and so when I arrived into that swelter in a floor length black wool coat, I nearly fainted. Now it seems like an echo. I remember the ugly, smoggy ride from the airport into town, palm trees, a horse tied up to a building, a man in a seersucker suit dancing, and when I went to my meeting in a black business suit, the lady from the Mississippi bureau telling me I must be from New York because of it. I worked for the Associated Press then.
The night Katrina came, Kali was over, and it was hard for me to tear myself away from the news. I like news – it was what I used to do, after all, and despite only working in it a few years, I still carry the bogus sense that watching whatever is happening on TV is some sort of action. Maybe paying attention always is; but then, maybe it’s just these days. Kali’s boyfriend is from New Orleans, wasn’t down there then, but I worried about his heart, and hers. After a while, we agreed to turn off the news. When we checked it later, the storm had come through and everything seemed fine. The world had not ended, because the waters rose later.
I will watch you over and over. That’s what I wrote September 11, 2002, when I kept watching the news and friends wouldn’t or couldn’t. Being in the moment of the event seemed preferable to its aftermath. That’s a pathology of reporters and why I left the business. Perhaps I should blame my synethstesia, that speaking and seeing aren’t much different for me. Certain types of pain taste like blueberries.
At work, I would announce water level updates, neighborhood by neighborhood as they came in. It was a distant curiosity to them that I was so involved in something I wasn’t involved in at all. When 9/11 happened, it was calling my boss to tell him they needed C batteries, not A batteries here or there. I sat in our office, while he drove an SUV of stuff he’d gotten as Costco around to various central points. Where do we buy dog booties? he called to ask at one point. It felt like doing something, but was merely the same mad scramble. I would write People are giving out their home phone numbers on the television. We were learning the signs and language of the end of the world.
When I was small, my parents would make me turn off the TV at dinner. These days, I recognize that this was important – this development of social discourse at mealtimes. As a child though, it made me angry, my father’s low disgust at what was on the news. He said he couldn’t stand to watch all those terrible things. I could stand it. And I was seven. Why couldn’t he?
I gave a two-hour presentation in New Orleans on the day after my arrival, and then had two days to do as I chose. Young, and from New York, none of the bureau people invited me to anything, and I was glad, because I was certain that in New Orleans something was waiting for me.
Walking in the French Quarter alone, hypnotized by gaslights and believing in the stories my parents reviled me for as a child, I wondered if maybe vampires were real, and were waiting for me to follow the right trumpet down the right deserted street. I didn’t much care if whatever was calling to me was going to get me killed, something was calling to me, and I knew enough to know that didn’t happen to most people.
Then again, most people aren’t storytellers, aren’t listeners, and if they believe in ghosts at all believe that something has to be alive before it can be spectral. Before I left, my boss, Bill, had said It’s America’s alcohol theme park! There was a convention of twenty-thousand Shriners there when I arrived, and teen-agers carrying giant crosses through the streets. Men stared at me from balconies and doorways and it wasn’t so much that I didn’t have the courage to be a whore, as I thought I would be disappointed by the experience.
Kali read a lyric essay at one of her conferences this year, a story of flesh and cities. It includes New Orleans. There’s a copy on my desk, found in a recent cleaning fit.
For Phoenix Rising I will return to New Orleans. And I worry I won’t hear things calling to me, won’t walk alone to listen for it, will see merely an echo of what I lived with those years in Washington DC – a city without people, merely tourists and concepts. The Washington DC you see is not the Washington DC of its true citizens – largely poor and black. When someone tells you they are from DC, generally, they mean Maryland or Virginia. As a tourist, you’re supposed to love DC blind. New Orleans too, I think. This is wrong, because I know I never knew DC until I sat on the stoop of a voodoo shop at 1 in the morning, listening to blues trailing out of a private club on the other side of the street in a deserted industrial neighborhood, long since paved over with condos.
The letter Michael never opened was written in my hotel room after that night of walking alone. I was at the Double Tree, the air conditioning was out, and The Lost Boys was on TV, and I wrote to man I barely knew and believed myself to be in love with because he was as verbally frenetic as myself (later, the feeling was truer and more complex, I state for the record) about how I was supposed to be spending this time fucking a stranger, but wouldn’t you know it, and I laughed in my handwriting, I was too scared.
Three days after Katrina hit, I did something I have never done. I turned off the news. My desk job is in media analysis, and I was doing probably every waking minute of my day except my commute listening to or reading the news from the Gulf Coast. After the article about people euthanizing their dogs at a hospital because they didn’t think they would survive to care for them, I started shaking. Above all things, I believe in doing what is necessary. Largely, I think I adhere to that world view successfully, and build my own very real and occasionally vicious code of honour around and upon it. However, what is necessary is always larger than advertised; may we all never have cause to learn this in the flesh. But it was what I learned of on TV and in the papers during Katrina, and maybe after, I became quieter about certain things. And despite repeated attempts, I have been unable to watch more than a few minutes of the Spike Lee documentary about it all on HBO. I start crying and change the channel.
In New Orleans in May, I will dress like a man who doesn’t exist and be irritated by my inability to raise one eyebrow instead of both. I will write Kali a letter. And I will find an excuse to throw on mundane clothes and walk the French Quarter at night alone, in case I can still hear earlier fictitious loves of mine calling from down dark and dirty streets. I will attempt to explore and remember in a place with a type of magick that unsettles me, a dozen foods I once loved that can only poison me now, and a type of heat that requires an acceptance of filth.
For the record, I believe that time is bullshit, that everything has already happened, and that everything happens at once. We perceive time as linear and experience grief due to this perception, but it is in actuality merely a seething ball of disorder. Any story, every story, is not only true, but begins wherever one wishes to notice, pull or pick up the thread.
Every writer has one place where they believe the world ends. For Steve Erickson it is Berlin. And I know for me, for all the romances I haven’t had and will never have with it, it is New Orleans. And I think maybe sometimes, that she was made for grief for things before they’re ever even lost.
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 10:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-24 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 11:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-24 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 11:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-24 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 12:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-24 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 01:12 pm (UTC)This is interesting, and compelling. I think you've told you went there before but I didn't know how much that experience colored in shadows.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-24 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 01:57 pm (UTC)I am glad you are going back and I hope you hear it's alleys and dark corners call to you again.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-24 01:46 am (UTC)Thanks.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-24 03:48 am (UTC)hear, hear. i've found that i've begun judging people by what i think they're capable of when it really comes down to it. i think maybe i've found my own limits in the past few years and likewise been disappointed to find them in others.
i hope you hear your call still. i think you do, regardless of where you are.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-24 03:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-28 06:18 pm (UTC)I will dress like a man that doesn't exist
Wow.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-28 06:23 pm (UTC)